


The Naming of Cats

by Provocatrixxx



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Kittens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:39:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Provocatrixxx/pseuds/Provocatrixxx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“A cat, John?” Sherlock glances up at him when John walks into the sitting room, still wearing his coat to keep the cat from falling.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Kitten, actually,” he says, “can’t be more than a few months old, judging by the size of it.” The kittens claws catch in his jumper as he pulls it from his jacket, and it lets out another plaintive sound as John cradles it against his chest, still shivering a little from the rain caught in its fur.</i>
</p><p>Walking back from the pub one rainy evening, John finds a tiny lost kitten. He brings it home. Surprisingly, chaos does not ensue...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming of Cats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Interrosand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrosand/gifts).



> For the delightful [Interrosand](http://archiveofourown.org/users/interrosand) because she is so very lovely and deserving of lovely things.
> 
> With grateful thanks to the brilliant [Evith](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/) for his advice and read-through.
> 
> Officially unbeta'd. All mistakes my own.

It’s cold, even for February, and John turns his collar up against the rain as he and Lestrade part ways on the corner. The beer has left him pleasantly buzzed though, and John walks briskly down the road, avoiding the puddles to keep the rain from soaking up his jeans. He crosses the road to take a shortcut through an alley, grateful that the rain has all but cleared the streets. Lost in his own thoughts, it takes him a moment to identify the high-pitched sound the echoes in the deserted alley. It sounds like a tiny distressed child, but the alley’s walls are made up of a kebab shop and un-occupied newsagent. Slowing his pace, John listens intently, waiting for the cry to sound again.

The noise is quieter this time, and John rolls his weight carefully, so as not to make loud footsteps. Whatever the creature is, it’s clearly frightened, possibly in pain. Mobile in hand, John walks slowly down the alley, scanning the bottoms of the walls for anything trapped. It’s not until he reaches the central telegraph pole that he sees it. There’s a sheet of cardboard roughly the size of a shoe box propped up against the wall, slightly buckled from the water that runs off it, and the sound is coming from just beneath it. Slowly, trying not to startle the creature, John lifts one of the lower corners and is greeted by an enormous pair of eyes. It’s a kitten, soaked and shivering, and it huddles back away from John’s hand.

“Shh,” he tells the kitten, crouching down and using his body to shield the kitten’s shelter from the worst of the rain. “It’s a bad night to be out by yourself,” he murmurs, easing the cardboard up a little more. “Where’s your family, eh?”

It takes him a while to coax the kitten out, and by the time he manages to curl a hand around the shivering body, both he and the kitten are soaking.

“It’s OK,” he tells the kitten as it struggles, “you’re OK now. I’ve got you.”

The kitten lets out a pathetic sound as John tucks it into his jacket, but it stays relatively still, calmed a little by his body heat. It’s a long and cold walk back to Baker Street, and John is even more grateful for the solitude caused by the rain. The kitten is a damp and shivering lump in the front of his jacket, and he talks soothingly to it all the way home.

***

“A cat, John?” Sherlock glances up at him when John walks into the sitting room, still wearing his coat to keep the cat from falling.

“Kitten, actually,” he says, “can’t be more than a few months old, judging by the size of it.” The kittens claws catch in his jumper as he pulls it from his jacket, and it lets out another plaintive sound as John cradles it against his chest, still shivering a little from the rain caught in its fur.

“Poor little thing was out in the rain,” John says, getting a better look at the kitten in the light. It’s a grey tabby with huge blue eyes and it looks back at him curiously as he studies it, growing bolder as it realises that John isn’t going to hurt it. “I’ll find a shelter tomorrow,” he tells Sherlock.

“Fine.” Sherlock is ignoring them both, typing up some notes on his laptop, but John doesn’t miss the way his gaze flickers up to the kitten between glancing at the notepad and back at the screen.

***

The kitten turns out to be female, and beautifully tabby-patterned once John has toweled her dry. He shuts her in the bathroom while he sorts his room out, folding a blanket into a cardboard box and shredding some newspaper into another. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do until the morning when he can phone a rescue centre and get her a proper place to stay. When he lets her out of the bathroom, the kitten walks disdainfully across the bedroom floor, looking curiously back at John before darting under his bed.

Years of habit mean that John keeps a neat room, but there’s a stack of spare blankets under his bed that John couldn’t find a suitable home for, and the kitten curls up in the dark corner just behind them, out of his reach.

“I’m not pulling you out of there,” he tells her when he’s tried lying down on the floor and reaching under with his arms. The kitten blinks at him owlishly, but doesn’t move. After checking that his door is wedged shut and placing a saucer of milk on the floor by the bed-box, John switches the lights off and climbs into bed, suddenly exhausted. The kitten’s gentle purrs just below his head lull him into sleep.

***

Sherlock is already awake by the time John comes down in the morning. He carries the kitten with him, cradled against his chest, not daring to leave her unsupervised in his room. She’d been quiet through the night, doubtless exhausted from her adventure, but he’d woken to loud purrs and a paw in his face, and it had taken all his willpower to keep from crying out in surprise. John is not a natural kitten-parent, it seems.

“What are you working on?” he asks Sherlock when he spies him at the kitchen table.

“An experiment,” Sherlock tells him with his usual note of disdain.

“I meant,” he says slowly, and is gratified when Sherlock turns to look at him, “are you working on anything that might harm her?”

“Not so long as she stays away from me,” Sherlock replies, but once John puts the kitten down on the carpet and double checks that all the doors are closed, he notes that the table is cleaner than usual, and that Sherlock has moved all of his chemicals onto the higher shelves.

“It’s a girl,” he tells Sherlock while he boils the kettle and gets toast on the go, “I reckon she’s about ten weeks old. Far too young to be out on her own, at any rate.”

Sherlock, as ever, gives no sign that he’s even heard him. John sighs and drains a can of tuna, dishing half of it into a shallow bowl and mushing it about a bit. He sets it down under the coffee table and tucks his feet up on the sofa, one eye on the paper and the other waiting for a sign of movement from the kitten. It takes her ten minutes to come out from behind the sofa, and she sniffs around the bowl for a good minute or two before starting to eat, sitting at an angle so she can see both John and Sherlock.

John admires her self-preservation strategies, finishing off his toast and padding past her to retrieve the Yellow Pages. The kitten eyes him warily, but doesn’t pause from eating her meal.

***

After the fourth call to a rescue centre that doesn’t have space, even for a kitten, John begins to despair. The kitten herself is sitting in John’s armchair, back tall and proud as she studies what she can see of the kitchen from the relative safety of the living room.

“What are we going to do with you?” John asks her, but she merely flicks an ear in his direction and continues watching Sherlock.

With a sigh, John pulls the phone book back into his lap, and tries again.

The woman on the other end of the phone sounds exhausted already, and John can hear the distress in her voice when she tells him that they really don’t have any space, not even for a kitten.

“Is there anywhere else I could try?” he asks her, “I’ve phoned all the centres, but no-one has anything.”

“Everyone’s full from Christmas,” the woman tells him, “I can look at finding her a foster family, but it’ll take a week or so. Is there any way you’d be willing to keep her for that long?”

John looks down at the kitten who’s grown suddenly brave and is stalking towards Sherlock with purpose.

“I can keep her until then,” he says, and smiles when he hears the relief in the woman’s voice as she takes down some details and promises to be back in touch as soon as possible.

***

“I’m going to the pet shop for some supplies. Please do not let the kitten out,” John says, leaning over the table and catching Sherlock’s eye to be sure he’s been heard.

“What supplies?” Sherlock asks, suddenly suspicious.

“Cat litter. A bowl. Some food. A basket maybe.”

“You’re keeping her then?”

“Only until they can find a foster family for her,” John promises.

“Fine.” Sherlock goes back to his experiment. John is careful to make sure that the door is closed tight behind him though.

***

Mrs Hudson greets them in the hallway when John returns to Baker Street. He’s holding a plastic carrier for the cat, reasoning that if he pads it out with some blankets, it’ll keep her safe if they have to go out. It makes it difficult to close the door though, and Mrs Hudson catches him just as he turns to go up the stairs.

“Oh!” She says when she spies the basket, “Are you and Sherlock getting a cat?”

“It’s a bit of a long story,” John says.

“I just don’t think the centre of London is the best place for a cat, dear,” she says, “are you sure you’ve thought this through?”

“We’re not keeping her. She’s was lost in the rain last night.” John puts the basket down on the stairs and shuffled his bags about. Cat litter, it turns out, is really heavy.

“Oh, the poor thing. Let me know if she needs anything, won’t you?” She pats John on the shoulder with a sad little smile before wandering out the front door.

***

When he gets up to the sitting-room, the kitten is nowhere to be seen. He takes a quick look under the sofa, just to be sure, and then wanders through to the kitchen. Sherlock, as usual, is in exactly the same position as John left him in.

“Have you seen the kitten?” he asks, lining up the catfood on the counter by the sink. Sherlock raises an eyebrow, and John feels his stomach swoop with worry. But then Sherlock points, and John follows the line to see the kitten perched on the counter, partially obscured by two medical textbooks, watching Sherlock intently.

“Hello,” John says, approaching slowly, and reaching out with his hand, palm up and fingers spread. “I’ve got some lovely new things for you.”

The kitten doesn’t acknowledge him at all, but she ducks out from under his hand at the last moment, squeezing herself around the text-books to continue her study of Sherlock and his experiments. John just laughs and goes to set up her sleeping quarters.

***

“Will you be alright with her while I’m at work?”

Sherlock frowns up at him, turning a page in his notebook and leaning in to take a reading from his thermometer.

“She’s a kitten, John.” he says.

The kitten herself is perched on the very edge of the table, staring intently at the liquid that Sherlock is heating, though her gaze flickers to his hand when he makes notes on the paper.

“Just don’t poison her or anything, OK?”

“We’ll be fine,” Sherlock says, and John has a sudden image of him as a sullen child. He must have been a nightmare.

He goes to scritch the kitten on the head as he passes. She allows the touch for a second or so, but then ducks away again, her ears bent, and resumes watching Sherlock work.

***

It’s almost midnight by the time he gets home, and John is exhausted. He takes the stairs slowly, wary of the carnage that a virtually unsupervised kitten has caused in their living room. When he pushes the door open, however, the rooms are quiet, and lit only by the desk-light and the muted TV.

A half-empty bowl of cat food sits on the floor by the sink, and there’s a bit of string with a scrap of paper tied to the end of it wrapped around the legs of the chair. John smiles to himself, rounding the corner into the sitting-room carefully. Sherlock is sprawled on the sofa in his dressing-gown, his feet kicked up on the arm and his face turned away from the TV. The kitten is curled into a purring ball of fluff on his chest, nose tucked into the crook of his shoulder. She opens a beady eye and glares at John as he leans against the wall watching them both.

“I see you two are getting on,” he says.

“Berlioz and I were fine. Just as we told you,” Sherlock tells him, shifting into a more comfortable position with a hand on the kitten’s back. The kitten, John notes, bats up into Sherlock’s touch, arching her back a little as Sherlock pets her.

“Berlioz?” he asks.

“Well we can hardly call her Offenbach,” Sherlock scoffs.

There’s no arguing with that. Berlioz blinks up at him from her place on Sherlock’s lap, perfectly content with the world.

John moves Berlioz’s litter tray into the shared bathroom and turns in for the night.

***

Berlioz grows in confidence by the day, prowling about the lower floor like a panther. She consents to the occasional petting from John and Mrs Hudson, but Sherlock is clearly her favourite. She likes to sit on the very edge of the kitchen table and watch him as he experiments, though she’s not yet sure of smoke, and still doesn’t trust the kitchen taps.

One afternoon, John comes home to find a spreadsheet on the coffee table with columns marked ‘string’ and ‘mouse’ and ‘paper’ followed by a complex scheme of numbers. This is followed a day later by the rather gruesome discovery of a piece of dried pig’s trotter with a long string threaded through it.

“Sherlock, what is this?” he asks, trying not to look too disgusted as he holds it at arm’s length.

“She was biting my toes whenever I stopped playing with her,” Sherlock says, “I made it to distract her.”

John pinches the bridge of his nose and puts the toy down again, laughing when Berlioz hops off the table and takes the toy away from him, a scowl writ clear across her fluffy face.

***

On Friday, the sky thunders in a way that only London can, and everything is grey and desolate and beautiful. John treats himself to a taxi home, dashing to the front door just as another peel rumbles through the streets. The soft lilt of Sherlock’s violin sounds clearly from their rooms, and John frowns as he peels his sodden jacket off. Sherlock seldom plays when they have no case, and John has never heard him play nursery rhymes before. _Oranges and Lemons_ slides neatly into _Lincolnshire Poacher_ as John climbs the stairs, his jeans heavy and clinging damply to his calves.

He pushes the door open slowly, but the music doesn’t stop. Sherlock glances up at him when he enters, bow running smoothly across the strings as his fingers dance. John loves watching him play.

“Everything OK?” he asks softly.

Sherlock nods towards the sofa in response, and sees Berlioz curled into a tight ball there, partially hidden behind one of John’s jumpers.

“She’s afraid of the thunder,” Sherlock tells him, finishing the tune and dropping his bowing hand to his side. Immediately the last note fades, Berlioz lets out a pathetic mewling noise, burrowing further into the jumper, cries crescendoing into a howl of discontent.

John sits down beside her, and it is a mark of how afraid she is when she curls into his side, burrowing under his arm as another round of thunder rattles the windows. John can feel her shaking when he picks her up and curls her into his arms.

She doesn’t properly calm until Sherlock starts playing again though, the steady repetition of _When the Boat Comes in_ soothing her shakes, though she still stays cuddled into John.

By the time the storm blows over them, John knows they can’t send her off to a foster family. He hands Berlioz to Sherlock and walks up to his room to call the Rescue Centre back.

END


End file.
